E6121 Reliable Software

Fall 2011 -- Junfeng Yang

Reading

Read
this
article about how to read a research paper. The take-home
message is that until you can answer a bunch of questions, you are
not done reading a paper. William lists a number of important
questions. I would add two: 1) What are the re-usable
principles/tricks/algorithms presented in this paper? 2) What is the
(authors') insight that drives the research? A system research paper
often has a bunch of novel tricks. I believe the more such things
you have in your toolbox, the more likely you can come up with an
elegant/novel system design.

Presentation

Some advice on how to give a good presentation:

Be very selective about the talk contents. It's almost
always the case that you have more stuff than your audience can
understand within a short amount of time. You should thus be very
selective about what to include in your talk. What is the important
thing about your proposal? What is neat, unusual, interesting to a
listener? Figure it out, and say it in the talk, more than once.
Do not try to include everything in your talk.

Repeat the key points. Don't expect your listener to always
follow your talk. It's a good idea to repeat and highlight the key
points several times, for example, once at the beginning, once when
you actually present them, and once at the end. Make sure your
listener won't miss the most important stuff of your talk.

Use an outline. A good way to keep your audience with
you is to use an outline slide to describe the structure of your
talk. I typically present an outline slide after the introduction
of a talk. Then, as I go from one section to another, I may show
the outline slide again, to let the audience know where we are.

Get the timing right. Each content slide typically takes
1-3 minutes. Thus, for a 10 minutes talk, do not have more than
6-7 slides of real content! Note the title slide and outline
slides do not count in this total because they take little time to
present.

Use visual aids, but do not abuse them. Pictures,
animations are sometimes very handy at explaining complex ideas.
However, use them only on the most important stuff; otherwise,
they'll distract your listener.

Above all else, practice, practice, practice. Practicing
is the real key to give a good talk. I find it much more useful
to practice aloud than to murmur to myself. If you can, try to
give the talk in front of other people. Practicing is certainly
the only way to get timing right.

Some online advice from others:

Read
this
paper about things to avoid when giving a talk
Read
this paper
about how to give a good conference talk. Many ideas apply to the
mini-talk you'll give.

Writing

Some suggested readings (to make you a better writer):

Read
this paper
about how to write a technical paper. Many ideas apply to writing
proposals as well.
Read this paper
about how to write sentences, paragraphs, etc.
And, of course, read Strunk and
White. Many times.